Beware the Resurrection-Men!

Resurrection-men – or body-snatchers – were names given to grave robbers active in the 18th and early 19th centuries who dug-up freshly-buried corpses to sell to anatomy schools and medical students for dissection. This grisly practice was borne of a distinct shortage of fresh cadavers for the numerous university and private anatomy schools across the country. By the mid 18th century medical teaching was based on firm empirical foundations: in other words, for a medical student to really know how the body worked, he would have to get right inside it – something only achievable through human dissection. Each medical student, therefore, needed a supply of fresh bodies to dissect which was not necessarily easy, as Helen MacDonald explains: “What medical men did with the dead contravened deeply held social beliefs about how human beings should properly be dealt with, post mortem. It mattered that bodies were treated with respect and buried whole for all kinds of reasons, including an expectation that the dead would rise in bodily form on God’s final judgment day”. One way of alleviating the problem was the so-called Murder Act of 1752 which furnished anatomists with the bodies of recently executed murderers. But in truth, this simply did not provide sufficient specimens, so the anatomists turned to black-market bodies, illicitly disinterred under the cover of darkness by resurrection-men!

It is a tale of macabre fascination and ghoulish enterprise: the rampant and horrific practice in early 19th-century London of snatching dead bodies from fresh graves - or in some cases, committing murder - to use the corpses for anatomical dissection. Nearly two centuries later, these stories still serve as a reminder of the tension between medical need and bodily autonomy.

Now an exhibition at the Museum of London adds new archaeological evidence to our understanding of the “resurrection men”, the anatomists they supplied and the occasionally blurry distinction between the two. By balancing this evidence with a careful examination of the social atmosphere, growing field of surgery and grimly simple equation of supply and demand, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men offers fresh insight into a discomfiting legacy.

I'm sorry if you may find the content graphic. But, the markets are just too profitable to ignore. No matter whether it's legal or not. Besides, it'll be 'legal' soon enough. Your DNA will be copyrighted, patented, and registered. All of it incorporated into our database of ownership. You have nothing to say in the matter. It has been written! It is has been done!